Twyla Tharp Quotes

I feel I can handle the architecture of dance as well as anybody.

The first steps of a creative act are like groping in the dark: random and chaotic, feverish and fearful, a lot of busy-ness with no apparent or definable end in sight.

Whether or not God has kissed your brow, you still have to work. Without learning and preparation, you won't know how to harness the power of that kiss.

Failing, and learning from it, is necessary. Unil you've done it, you're missing an important piece of your creative arsenal.

To embrace luck, you have to enhance your tolerance for ambiguity.

The more you fail in private, the less you will fail in public.

If you're speaking of love, you really must include the element of uncertainty - and perhaps it's best approached as the art of constant maintenance.

I always find that the best collaborations are when you work with people that know what they're doing, and you leave them alone to do it.

I have learned over the years that you should never save for two meetings what you can accomplish in one.

I've always found it necessity to strip away everything but the most fundamental ways to work - the rest is style.

But obligation, I eventually saw, is not the same as commitment, and it's certainly not an acceptable reason to stick with something that isn't working

I have to feel that each thing I've learned I can push to another point next time. I'm not very good with repetition. I would rather not work than feel that repetition is the order of the day.

Living had little use for me other than how it could be funneled into dance.

I have always felt one of the things dance should do - its business being so clearly physical - is challenge the culture's gender stereotypes.

As people who have commitments and obligations, we try to blockade emotions and go on our course towards excellence, and that's a lie. I've definitely paid a price. Everything is an exchange.

The disasteris not the money, although the money will be missed. The disaster is the disrespect--this belief that the arts are dispensable, that they're not critical to a culture's existence.

There is obviously a power and a truth in action that doesn't lie, which words easily can do.

I do believe that when dancing is right, the movement possesses a logic common to us all.

Modern dancers should be doing things no one else is doing, and it should come from the gut.

The great ones never take fundamentals for granted.

Every dance I make is a dive into this well of ancient memory.

There's an energy that comes through the release of tension that is laughter.

That's what improvising is like for me. There's no tollbooth between my impulse and my action.

I understand things that are American, for better or worse.

You double your intensity with skill.

I always, somehow, knew that I was going to dance.

Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them.

This is the hard part. Knowing and admitting a problem are not the same as solving it. But executing a solution is also the fun part, because the solution save you and gets you moving again.

I'm a known reader. That's what I do with my time.

The blank space can be humbling. But I've faced it my whole professional life. It's my job. It's also my calling. Bottom line: Filling this empty space constitutes my identity.

The rewards of dancing are very different from choreographing.

I never studied with Balanchine, but his work was very important to me.

I don't mean this, but I'm going to say it anyway. I don't really think of pop art and serious art as being that far apart.

I was privileged to be able to study a year with Martha Graham, the last year she was teaching.

I have a sort of tactility about music. I go into record stores and just run my fingers over it, the spines.

In order to be creative, you have to know how to prepare to be creative.

I think Tolstoy had an unbelievably complicated relationship with women.

I was interested in becoming a show dancer, for which I tried, but I'm not tall enough.

Art is running away without ever leaving home.

I was fortunate to love men, so I could put them on stage and make roles for them, and move through their bodies in a way that they enjoy doing...

In the end all collaborations are love stories.

There really is nothing I ever had access to that I didn't appreciate.

Just when you arrive at the apex of your skills, it's time to retire. But as it turned out, I decided that since it was the thing that I felt I did best, I owed it to all that be to pursue it.

Our guys have a vision of something bigger.

This is not a pleasant route for many young people to consider. You have to be either hopelessly passionate, or very stupid.

Nobody likes to see that which they've invested in disappear from the face of the earth before they've even died. This is not cool. We can now see what the landmarks, in fact are.

In the not-for-profit world, there can be wastefulness because there's not the desperate urgency of when you're on a clock.

I've survived inattention. I hope to God I survive attention.

Alone is a fact, a condition where no one else is around. Lonely is how you feel about that.

Reading is your first line of defense against an empty head.